Hello and welcome to my Web Page. I am a
church musician, composer and church music scholar residing in the Vancouver area in British Columbia, Canada. While I have a deep interest
in all aspects of the study of hymns, psalms and songs for Christian
worship, my own particular area of expertise is in Canadian hymn
traditions. My Ph.D. dissertation from the University of Toronto
involved a study of the hymn tune repertoire in The United Church of
Canada, the denomination in which I work, and its parent
denominations, the Methodist, Presbyterian and Congregationalist
Churches in Canada before church union in 1925. You can download
a copyfrom the National Library of
Canada (warning—large file!). I currently direct A Quired Taste, a
chamber choir in the Vancouver area devoted primarily to the performance
of early Canadian hymn and psalm tune repertoire. Our first CD
recording can be sampled and ordered here.

My wife Cheryl and I are also active as music
leaders within the United Church and other denominations, in
congregational ministry, in workshop and retreat leadership, and
through concerts and other events. We have four recordings available of my own compositions and four songbooks, all
available through our publishing company, Evensong
Worship Resources. I am also a past co-chair
of UCCAM, the United Church of
Canada Association of Musicians, and I served as Managing Editor for More Voices (2007), a project of the
United Church in partnership with Wood Lake Books to produce a
supplement to the current hymn book, Voices
United (1996).

HYMNOLOGY
LINKS

The following are links I have found to
useful sites on the web for the study of hymns and related music.
Please let me know of others you find which prove useful.

The
Hymn SocietyThe home page for the
Hymn Society in the United States and Canada

The Hymn
Tune IndexThe home page for Nicholas
Temperley's important index. The HTI database contains all hymn tunes
printed anywhere in the world with English-language texts up to 1820,
and their publication history up to that date!

Psalms
in MetreAn evolving source for texts
and midi files of tunes from various important English-language
psalters.

The Dictionary
of Canadian Biography Online
has biographies of many of Canada's early hymn writers and tune book
compilers such as Henry Alline, Alexander Davidson, Stephen
Humbert, and Joseph Scriven.

Early
Canadiana Online has a number of early hymn collections in
various First Nations languages online plus a few collections by female
authors. Try a subject search for "hymns".